Armani Party Fitting End To Milan Fashion Week

October 09, 2000|By Georgia Sauer.

Sept. 27-28: En route to Trieste for Peter's pre-season basketball tournament. First stop is Milan's Malpenza Airport, which is more mall than airport. Instead of tacky T-shirt shops, there are sleek boutiques -- Gucci, Bulgari, Valentino and Bruno Magli -- all glass and expensive wood with lacquered black accents. Not surprising, since Milan is fashion capital of Italy (the Milanese say of the world). If this is what the airport is like, can't wait to get to the shops in the city.

But first in Trieste, a northern Italian port city on a hillside about 100 miles east of Venice, there is a game against Madrid tonight (Sept. 27).

Peter's team, Telit Trieste, wins tonight as they do the next night against Istanbul, with Peter the high scorer with 22 points. Championship game Sunday night against Olympiakos of Greece, the same time. Versace's Versus spring collection is the show in Milan (Trieste loses the game but the Versus show is a winner).

Sept. 29-30. Sleep, sightseeing, shopping: The shows are just a part of the Milan experience. Sleep is made easy at the Carlton Baglioni, an exquisite five-star hotel.

The Baglioni has to be the best location for a fashionista: Around the corner are three intersecting cobblestoned shopping streets called the Golden Triangle --Via della Spiga, Via Sant'Andrea and Via Monte Napoleone. The tiny one-half square mile brings in several billion dollars a year. Guidebooks say the area has the highest concentration of status lines on earth. Via Spiga houses Prada, HermEs, Bottega Veneta and Tiffany, to name a few. Via Sant'Andrea has Armani, Ferre, Kenzo. Via Monte Napoleone has Cartier and Bulgari.

Sightseeing is extraordinary in Milan, a sister city to Chicago. Besides Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper," Milan is also known for its graffiti, but it is slowly being cleaned up. According to a taxi driver, $500 rewards are given for reporting vandals; when they're caught, the vandals have to clean up the graffiti as punishment.

Oct. 1. "The Perfect Show": That would be George Clooney sitting straight across the way, front-row center at the Versus show, looking a tad uncomfortable in a handsome-movie-star kind of way. Clasping and unclasping his hands self-consciously between his knees, his eyes did not follow the incredibly slender models slithering down the runway in various modes of dress and undress. But he grinned and watched designer Donatella Versace every second, as she walked down the runway at the end of the show, wearing skintight black pants and skimpy sweater, her signature long, white-blond hair as shiny and smooth as a lightbulb.

Oct. 2. Restaurants off the beaten via: From the hotel are many restaurants and trendy spots to explore. A few recommended by with-it fashion designers and journalists are worth noting. Gianfranco Ferre's favorite restaurants include Torre di Pisa -- a Tuscan trattoria where many fashion types hang out -- and Da Jiacomo, great for fish. Designer Lawrence Steele, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, shared his "secret, special restaurant, Centro Iticco, which is a fish market by day, a fish restaurant by evening. It's . . . unknown, charming."

Jean Paul Gaultier was at Corso Como 10 last Sunday, a combination designer boutique, book and record store and tented cafe. Nearby, at a restaurant called Cucina delle Langhe, one is likely to bump into Tom Ford or Donatella Versace with some American celebrity.

A good deal: The dollar is strong here ($1 equals about 2,200 lira), so the prices aren't horrendous at the off-beat places. For example, a pair of red leather boots lined in purple leather cost less than $100.

If you're going to buy one thing in Milan, make it leather -- shoes, boots, handbags, jackets in the softest skins. And perhaps avoid anything with initials. Who wants to be a fashion-victim tourist carrying Gucci totes, Louis Vuitton handbags and wearing Hermes belts? Many enchanting leather-goods boutiques have their own unusual designs, will make anything you want in your choice of colors.

Oct. 3. Lawrence of Chicago: School of the Art Institute grad Steele, who grew up in Rantoul, showed his collection for the sixth year. It was a packed crowd with Vogue editor Anna Wintour front and center.

Everyone was craning necks to see if Jennifer Aniston would show up -- Steele designed her wedding gown. She did not. '

Oct. 4. Armani the Great: Giorgio Armani is having quite a year. The Guggenheim Museum in New York is mounting a retrospective of his work beginning Oct. 20. He is expanding his store in Chicago to the new Park Hyatt Hotel off Michigan Avenue, and his spring shows were well-received here.

On top of that, he opened his own department store here -- 65,000 square feet of gray cement and glass on three levels.

The party was among the hottest tickets of the week. The store was walled off by a five-foot fence of greenery. Outside were white tents, the sidewalks carpeted in gray felt -- so Armani.